1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic mail, and more particularly, to high volume electronic mail delivery systems and methods.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic mail ("e-mail") is to the 1990s what fax machines were to the 1980s--a must-have capability for any corporate employee or service professional. Additionally, consumers are increasingly adopting e-mail through on-line services. The Internet, for example, has linked disparate e-mail systems, creating a truly international distribution medium. It is estimated that over thirty million people have access to e-mail via the Internet today with an annual growth rate exceeding 100 percent.
Today, e-mail is used primarily as an interpersonal communication technology. Corporate users communicate with customers, vendors, peers, subordinates, and superiors, while residential users are increasingly using e-mail to stay in touch with friends and relatives.
End-users generally do not use e-mail as an information services tool, however. As noted above, most e-mail is generated by one person and sent to another person. Very little of the worldwide e-mail volume is created by a computer. This is due in no small part to the challenges of creating automated processes for the generation and distribution of large volumes of unique e-mail messages.
In the past five years, several services have been created with the goal of using e-mail as an information services tool by creating a type of personalized electronic newspaper. The services use computers (and proprietary software) to sift through news stories or press releases and select those articles/stories that match a predefined profile of a particular subscriber. Generally, the profile is based on particular industries or products; however, there may be options for somewhat more refined sifting criteria.
These services all have one thing in common--they manipulate publicly available information (AP wire service, Reuters, Business Wire, etc.) and match this information to a generic customer profile, not to a unique individual. The resulting personalized newspaper is sent via e-mail or facsimile to all subscribers that match the selected profile.
There are other companies that have started on-line services that allow end-users access to more personalized information, such as Compuserv, Prodigy, America-on-line, or World Wide Web home pages. These services allow end-users to get quotes on publicly traded securities and allow end-users to search databases for particular strings of text or subject matter. These services suffer from a common disadvantage, however, namely, they require the active involvement of the end-user in accessing the information. In other words, each time the end-user desires information, he must dial up the service provider and request the information.
The Internet is made up of thousands of computers loosely coupled to one another by a common protocol and fiber optic transmission backbones. Each e-mail sent over the Internet must contain an address specifying to whom the e-mail is to be delivered.
An Internet e-mail address, such as, for example, "jfunk@merc.com," includes the name of the user the e-mail is addressed to (i.e., "jfunk"), followed by an "@" symbol. The mnemonic after the "@" defines the local destination the e-mail is destined for. The destination may be a domain name such as "merc.com," which does not refer to a specific computer, but to a networked domain of computers. Alternatively, the destination may correspond to a specific computer, such as the destination "netra.merc.com," which references the computer named "netra" in the "merc.com" domain.
When the destination after the "@" symbol refers to a group of hosts under the same administrator, such as "merc.com," it is called a domain name. When the destination refers to a specific computer, such as "netra.merc.com," the destination is often referred to as the host, or hostname. Throughout this specification, "hostname" and "domain name" are used to refer to the symbolic destination of the to-be-delivered e-mail.
Hostnames exist for the convenience of humans. The actual routing of information on the Internet is done with Internet Protocol ("IP") addresses. An IP address is a 32 bit, non-symbolic number, which represents the unique address of a device connected to the Internet. Before a computer can deliver e-mail, it must first determine the correct recipient IP address. Mappings between hostnames and IP addresses are kept in a distributed database on the Internet called the Domain Name System (DNS). Before the computer transmits its e-mail, it queries the DNS with a host name and waits for the corresponding IP address to be returned.
Most hostnames correspond to at least one IP address. The hostname "www.merc.com," for example, corresponds to the IP Address 204.255.152.133. The domain name "merc.com" is not a physical entity. It, therefore, has no IP Address and information cannot be directly routed to it. E-mail delivered to "merc.com" is sent to a site designated to receive e-mail for "merc.com." Alternate designated sites may be desirable even when the normal receiving site has an IP address. For example, an e-mail recipient may not want e-mails sent to his address at night if the computer is turned off.
The alternate designated sites for a hostname or domain name are called the hostname's Mail eXchanger (MX) hosts. A query of the DNS for the MX information on "jfunk@merc.com" will return a list of Internet hosts that will accept mail for "merc.com." If no alternate hosts are available, the query will indicate as much.
To transmit an e-mail message, a number of processing steps must be performed before the e-mail message is actually transmitted onto the Internet. Initially, a sending program determines whether it knows the current IP address corresponding to the e-mail hostname or MX hostnames. If not, the sending program queries the DNS for the IP address. The sending program then transmits an initial message to the destination, asking whether the destination computer can receive the e-mail. If the destination computer replies favorably, the sending program breaks the e-mail message up into a series of information packets, and separately transmits each packet. The destination computer receives the packets and reassembles them into the complete e-mail message.
Traditionally, e-mail transmission has been handled by a single sending program operating on a single queue of messages. That is, e-mails to be transmitted are lined up in a first-in-first-out (FIFO) queue, and the queue is handled by a transmitting program. Although this method works well for low-volume e-mail transmission, for sites that transmit thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages a day, the above-described method is slow and significantly underutilizes network bandwidth because information is being sent over the Internet neither while the DNS is being queried nor while the transmitting program is waiting for the destination to acknowledge the initialization message.
Occasionally, a host site cannot complete delivery of an e-mail message. When this occurs, the host site typically returns ("bounces") the e-mail message back to the sender with an attached error message explaining why the message could not be delivered. The returned messages are called "bounced messages." A large number of received bounced messages is burdensome on the system operator, who must manually read through the messages to determine the appropriate action.
It is therefore desirable to provide an information delivery system and methods that substantially obviate one or more of the problems due to the limitations and disadvantages of the related art.
It is also an object of the present invention to provide a low-cost system that allows a user to passively receive unique, customized, personal information via e-mail and/or facsimile machine.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an e-mail processing system that allows a user to automatically edit user information by either sending an e-mail or interacting with the processing system via the World Wide Web (WWW).
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide an efficient, high volume e-mail transmission system and method.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide an e-mail system and method to effectively, automatically handle bounced e-mail messages.
Additional features and advantages of the invention will be set forth in the description which follows, and in part will be apparent from the description, or may be learned by practice of the invention. The objectives and other advantages of the invention will be realized and attained by means of the instrumentalities and combinations particularly pointed out in the written description and appended claims hereof as well as the appended drawings.